Off-Season Wasn’t Business as Usual

Thank heavens, the preseason.

You’d like to think not much can go wrong in an off-season but this long summer took Chick Hearn and Bison Dele. Dele actually left the game a while ago and he was only intermittently interested when he was playing but there was a nice, fun guy under that tormented hot-dog exterior.

Hearn was a giant, a partner with Jerry West and Elgin Baylor in the Laker Trinity of the ‘60s that established the new team here. Chick was the Laker face and voice ever since and they will never be quite the same without him.

Then there were the usual garden-variety embarrassments, with so many of the guys getting involved with local law enforcement. Shaquille O’Neal, the noted police enthusiast, was allowed to ride along with sheriff’s deputies on a drug raid in East Baton Rouge, La., and accused by two men arrested of forcing one man’s head into a toilet, but cleared of any wrongdoing.

Then there were the players who were arrested, themselves. Commissioner David Stern was like a dad who gets a call in the middle of the night, telling him to come down and bail out one of his sons, which he does, only to return home to find the phone ringing again.

Then there was the NBA’s stirring appearance in the World Championships when we finally got the answer to the old question: How long will it take the world to catch up to us?

The answer: 10 years, from the 1992 debut of NBA players in the Olympics until this summer when we managed to lose games to Argentina, Yugoslavia and Spain. Now the question is, can we catch up to South America by 2002 so we can get one of the three spots in the qualifying tournament we’ll have to participate in to play in the 2004 Olympics?

Taking them, one embarrassment at a time ...

The World Championships--Representing the U.S. once looked like a win-win situation for the NBA, a publicity bonanza with no downside, but give our guys credit. They found one.

The ’92 Dream Team overwhelmed and charmed everyone at Barcelona but two years later, the NBA’s Young Guns taunted opponents and embarrassed themselves at the World Championships in Toronto so that several (Larry Johnson, Shawn Kemp, Derrick Coleman) were quietly retired from international participation.

By 2000, when the U.S. Olympians survived close calls against Lithuania and France and were called “whiners” by the host Australians, it had become lose-lose. If the Americans won, everyone yawned. It could only be news if they lost.

Welcome to Indianapolis in 2002, News Central.

First, Coach George Karl, attuned as ever to signs of disrespect, said the players were upset no one was paying any attention to them. Then they lost to Argentina, whereupon Reggie Miller told them they had to play for each other, since everyone (refs, fans, etc.) was against them. Then they lost to Yugoslavia and stopped saying anything, before quitting dead and losing to Spain.

The country sneered, if it noticed at all. Sports Illustrated’s Steve Rushin said he felt neither “anger nor disgust nor embarrassment but delight.”

Post-mortems pointed to the absence of O’Neal, Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady, or bad fundamentals, or the lack of a standing national team, but it’s simpler than that: There were too many self-styled stars, not enough role players, they lacked leaders, they didn’t respect their opponents, didn’t play hard until they felt threatened and didn’t get along.

Karl, charged with making them a team, went all sociological (“Is the money and greed of the NBA having an effect of our competitive nature? Yeah.”), dodging his contribution, which was to get tighter and tighter, as usual.

In 1996, while he was coaching the Seattle SuperSonics to the NBA Finals, one of his players, Frank Brickowski, said his voice was so high, only dogs could hear him.

Stern insists there’s no embarrassment, since the teams that beat the Americans did it with NBA players.

R-i-g-h-t.

“To me, there was no sense of urgency,” said Magic Johnson, who drove the Dream Team to glory, despite token opposition.

“The world has caught up a little bit but not to where they are going to beat us in the Olympics if the guys play who are supposed to play. And if we play the right style of ball and we have to respect those guys [opponents].”

This is how bad it was: Paul Pierce, thought to embody everything right about young players, turned prima donna, pouting when he didn’t get the ball, complaining to point guard Andre Miller on the bench for not giving it to him. To the delight of the rest of the team, Miller snarled back.

You can imagine what was going on behind the scenes by the time they lost their third game in the tournament.

On the other hand, from now on you can’t say there won’t be any suspense in these tournaments.

Aside from that, it was pretty much business as usual:

Allen Iverson--The latest crisis in his bumper-car-ride of a life began in an argument with his wife, whom he was alleged to have thrown out of their house nude. Then he was charged with forcing his way into a cousin’s apartment, looking for her, (Iverson has set up several friends and relatives from Virginia in houses and apartments in Philadelphia), carrying a gun.

The incident was accorded Crime of the Century status in Philadelphia (TV vans camped outside his estate, TV choppers flying over, etc.) but the cousin refused to testify and the case was dropped.

Boy, I bet AI really learned his lesson this time.

Chris Webber--Trouble follows this guy around, most of his own making, but this is too much. Half the NBA got money under the table in college but it’s Webber who’s indicted for lying to a grand jury, nine years after leaving, for denying he took $280,000, which booster Ed Martin claimed he gave him.

The only dispute is how much Webber took (he says it was a few bucks here and there) but he’s not a hometown guy any more and the local district attorney is hounding him as if he was looking for tax problems with Al Capone.

Webber’s father, Mayce, and his, aunt, Charlene, have been indicted, too (seriously). However, unless the prosecution can produce 280K worth of checks, it looks like Webber’s word against Martin’s, and a fool’s errand of a case.

Alonzo Mourning--Great heart. Bad kidney. He won’t play this season, or perhaps ever again, returning the Heat to square one. Pat Riley, an obsessively hard-driving veteran’s coach, will play kids and rebuild for the first time. There was already speculation that Riley wanted out but owner Micky Arison wouldn’t let him go.

Paul Gaston--The clueless absentee owner, whose family presided over the demise of the Celtic Dynasty in its 19 years, did the franchise a favor and sold it for $360 million, realizing a tidy profit of $350 million. Unfortunately, his people had further compromised their future, giving up any hope of creating salary cap room by trading Kenny Anderson, whose big contract was about to run out, for the scorned Vin Baker, who has four seasons at $50 million left on his.

James Dolan--Son of Cablevision boss Charles Dolan, he now runs Madison Square Garden (nice to see talent rewarded, isn’t it?) but the parent company’s stock is down from $50 to $10 in a year and the old free-spending days are over. The Knicks had a chance to get Dikembe Mutombo but Dolan reportedly turned the deal down. Mutombo wound up with the arch-rival Nets, who now own New York.

Donald Sterling--He had a chance to change the way he and his franchise were perceived this summer, by locking up cornerstones Elton Brand and Michael Olowokandi.

He didn’t. He’s still our Donald.